TankSpot's Guide to Heroic Chimaeron

Be sure to check after the break for full video transcript and strategy!

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video, I will be discussing the strategy for Hard Mode Chimaeron in the Blackwing descent raid instance. This guide will assume you are familiar with normal mode, and deal exclusively with the changes present in the hard mode encounter.

From a healing perspective, the fight is relatively unchanged. You still only need to heal people to over 10k, but tank healing and fued-phase healing are slightly more intense. This fight boils down to Tank coordination and DPS control.

The first item of note is the unchanged enrage timer; it is still 7 minutes, but chimaeron's health has been increased to 126 million. This, combined with what is essentially a three-tank requirement, means you need to maximize your damage where you can. We ran with 7 healers to cover the intense fued phase healing, and used two tanks. Because of the mechanic preventing any player from being one-shot as long as they are over 10k, we opted to have a DPS DK tank as long as Finkle's mixture was up. The other tanks tanked him during fued phase and soaked double attacks during Finkle's Mixture. This increased our DPS output with no change in healing requirements.

The next change from normal mode concerns "Fued" phase. After Chimaeron casts fued, Papa Nefarian will tell his little hydra child's heads to quit bickering. Chimaeron will Fued for only two seconds, then revert back to meleeing his primary aggro target and continue to stack break. To handle this, you'll want a tank with no stacks of break to pick him up. Your raid will still go without Finkle's mixture until the next Massacre, so you need to have your raid stack up to soak the poison vomit just like on normal mode. Your tank should stand away from the raid to prevent the vomit from hitting him as well. Chimaeron will double attack once during this phase, and a tank with a single stack of break can rotate cooldowns to survive it.

Please note that your tank needs to be topped up in the two second window following the massacre that knocks bile-o-tron offline. We rotated Guardian Spirit and Lay on Hands to ensure he wouldn't be gibbed by a quick melee.

The reason for having three tanks--even if one of them is actually just a melee DPS--is on the likely chance that Chimaeron will knock Bile-o-Tron offline two massacres in a row. If this happens, the last Fued tank will still have stacks of break, and will definitely die upon application of the third stack OR from double attack--chimaeron hits hard to begin with, and him hitting 50-75% harder will ruin your day. With three tanks, you can rotate between two tanks on Fued phases to ensure that you're always using a tank with zero break stacks.

The final change occurs in phase 3. Nefarian will cast a shadow DoT spell on your whole raid called "Mocking Shadow," which deals one to two thousand damage per second to your entire raid. While you are still unable to heal players, you can mitigate the DoT with Power Word: Barrier, Raid Wall, Aura Mastery, and other personal cooldowns. Because of this, it's best to enter the final phase with your whole raid topped off. Chimaeron will not apply the healing debuff until riiiiight around 22%, so we chose to bring him down to 24%, waited for massacre, stacked up, topped the raid off, and pushed him into the final phase. As in normal mode, hike up your britches, pop cooldowns, and go to town.

Thanks for watching this guide. As usual, feel free to leave comments either on youtube or the official strategy thread on tankspot.com. You can also subscribe to this channel for access future raid guides. I have included the last half of this fight with some commentary to demonstrate how we handled the encounter.